Joe Klein’s Courage: Iran and the Prospect of “Reset”

The most important media event of a very eventful week was, without doubt, Joe Klein’s appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Klein came on the morning Americans learned four of its diplomats had been killed in Libya, and that the embassy in Cairo was besieged. Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset had been on earlier, trying to foment an American war against Iran.

Klein began by addressing Israeli efforts to ignite a war and meddle in the US elections, which he called “outrageous” and “disgusting”–like nothing he had seen in 40 years of journalism. It is worth interjecting here that Klein, now with Time, is no conventional liberal; I first came to know his work 20 years ago when he wrote for New York magazine and was–we at the very conservative NYPost editorial page understood–the one “mainstream” media figure most willing to tell truths uncongenial to the liberal narratives about the schools, or crime in the city, or New York City politics in general.

But more important than Klein’s unequivocal condemnation of Netanyahu’s warmongering and election meddling was his nuanced discussion of Iran, a subject which never receives other than one-dimensional treatment in the American mass media. Klein said several times that Iran was (in implicit contrast to the riotous cities of the Arab world) “a real country” with a highly-educated populace living in high rise apartments, not in tents. Nowhere in the world was there a greater mismatch between the population–sophisticated, somewhat pro-American–and the government. But the government, despite its anti-Americanism and fascist tendencies, was not crazy. All Iranians were under the influence of the dominant civil fact–that Iran took a million casualties in its decade-long war against Iraq, and wouldn’t risk a repeat of that.

Asked repeatedly by Morning Joe’s Donny Deutsch to say what would happen if we woke up one day next year to the news that Iran had, indeed, developed a bomb, Klein gave the kind of understated, lucid and factual answer that is so far removed from our present fevered discourse that it should probably be understood as an example of unusual courage: “It would provide protection for Iran against an Israeli attack or an American attack.” That might be an answer you would hear from an international relations specialist, or a top ranking military officer– but nowhere else before an American mass audience.

The entire segment bears watching, as it raises the question of why should Iran be our big number one enemy at all, period. A full history of the making of Iran into a major foe remains to be written, though it surely owes much to Israeli and neoconservative ideological machinations at the end of the Cold War, when Islam and the clash of civilizations was substituted for communism as our unifying source of all fears. If Iran’s nuclear program was rational and not the prologue to armageddon, and its people are sophisticated and pro-American, the obvious next question is whether Iran–as opposed to medieval Saudi Arabia for instance–needs to be treated as an enemy at all. During the segment Mike Barnicle chipped in to say that former senator Bob Kerrey speaks of Iran as “America’s most natural ally” in the Middle East. It is an argument made in the very interesting book Reset by Stephen Kinzer. It is worth recalling that Iran was the only place in the Middle East where there were spontaneous expressions of grief after 9/11–Teheran’s citizens took to the streets in candlelight vigils. In the months to follow, there was substantial intelligence cooperation between Iran and the US, as Washington went after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That was brought to halt, regrettably: The neocons in the Bush administration had a different agenda, and turned their attention to Iraq. And Iran after all was a potential rival to Israel’s military domination of the Middle East.

But looking at the fevered crowds whipped up throughout the Middle East (which are more or less absent in Teheran) it does raise the question of rapprochement. Klein has begun to sketch out a normative and cultural foundation for such an event. For TV newstalk, it was an exceptional moment.

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14 Responses to Joe Klein’s Courage: Iran and the Prospect of “Reset”

One of the reasons that the talk of war against Iran still gets so much play on American airwaves is that the word “Iraq” is never said in the same piece. As Daniel Larison notes, there seems to be a case of amnesia among media and Congressional types about Iraq. Thankfully, the military and the White House seem to remember the cost of the Iraq War

Notice what he says about the intelligence cooperation. That was the moment to sit down and say, what can the two of us do to lessen tensions here? What can we do to promote stability here? Instead in what had to be among the stupidest foreign policy speeches in history, the “sainted” (to neocons) George Bush threw them under the bus. Amazingly dumb, even for them.

We forget that it was Eisenhower using street thugs to over throw the Mossedegh government and install that kleptomaniac human rights abusing shah even though Mossedegh had not attacked or threatened to attack us. It was about nothing but oil. So very noble of us and neocon nonsense at its worst.

If these guys are so evil let the neocons explain why there are Jewish temples open in the capital city. Why Jews serve in the government, the only place outside Israel itself where this is the case in the region. Why hasn’t this murderous bunch of thugs killed them all by now as a run up to killing the rest of them? Because maybe they aren’t?

And we know that airpower alone won’t do it. What the “sainted” Israeli leader is really asking for is another ground war which we cannot win and won’t win. He wants an attack that will devastate our economy for at least a year maybe more. This is what passes for rational on this side of the fence?

Bravo! Americans essentially have been duped by Aipac and other extremist elements of the Israel lobby. Time after time, the Israel lobby has blocked the restoration of normal relations between the US and Iran. Aipac wants Israel to be free to continue its insane colonisation programme in the West Bank.

Elites are still miffed about losing Iran as a satrapy under their puppet tyrant the Shah with all the attendant non-democratic benefits that accrued to them. Israel wants nothing but neighbor nations which are weak and in either chaos or under the rule of tyrants who are in western employ, against the democracy of their own peoples’ interests,

Much of religion being a human construct, the riots against western insult of Islam are really pregnant with resentments created by domination and exploitation of the western elites against the interests of people there. Religion is simply the language used, the local dialect of the deeper human situation involved. This latest is simply insult added to injuries done to whole peoples.

This reveals how a faulty concept of security for us based on “Full Spectrum Dominance” of the rest of humanity is doomed to fail, because after all these are human beings just like us, despite the different culture used to express the grievances of those dominated.

It’s funny. I come at Joe Klein from the exact opposite perspective as yours, Mr. McConnell. I used to revel in seeing New York Newsday’s Les Payne wipe the floor with Klein and his neo-liberal nostrums every Sunday morning on New York City’s WCBS-TV. Payne was an editor at New York Newsday at the time and for years afterward, while Klein continued failing upwards.

Given my general disdain for Joe Klein, I was therefore astounded – heck, almost dumbstruck – to hear such clear thinking and level-headedness from him on the subject of Iran. I’m sure he’s still an American imperialist, when push comes to shove, but at least he’s not being a blind fool on this one issue.

Wow, first Diane Ravitch realizes that her allies of the last 30 years were more interested in breaking teachers unions and privatizing public education than in improving the curriculum, and now Joe Klein breaks with the neo-cons and pro-Israel Lobby on Iran. Perhaps a new Age of Miracles is upon us.

Think of what might have been salvaged if others had taken the right road – or even just listened – earlier. I am reminded yet again of how precious has been the light shed by sites like TAC through this long darkness.

First, regarding US rapprochement with Iran. I still remember an article in the old TAC, back when it was edited by Pat Buchanan, Taki, and some other guy [the “other guy” was Scott McConnell, the author of this post — Ed], that argued for exactly that. I think the article was by William Lind. But both the US and Iran want to be hegemons in that region, so if the US were to cut a deal with Iran, the US would have to betray some of its client states: one or more of Israel, Saudi Arabia, other gulf states. That in itself would be a huge deal; it would make sense only as part of a sudden, revolutionary, world-wide and destabilizing turnaround in US policy. So it’s ridiculous to suggest that an ideological, hegemonic Iran is America’s “most natural ally” there. It’s nothing like Nixon’s rapprochement with China. It just won’t happen. That’s totally beside the fact that both the US and Iran are strongly interventionist in that region for largely ideological, not national-interest, reasons.

Some of Joe Klein’s points were very wise and some were very stupid. The point about the Iranian people being educated, secular-oriented, and pro-American is an old neocon talking point; it was popularized by Bernard Lewis. It’s just irrelevant to a country where the Islamist government is firmly in control.

Klein is right that Netanyahu’s depiction of an Iran run by crazy fanatics is ridiculous: Netanyahu’s just playing to the dumb Republican Zionists in the US, the ones who watch Fox News. The Iranian government does not want to launch any suicidal first strike.

There’s a reasonable fear, though, that some crazy “Twelfth Mahdi” elements in the Revolutionary Guard, or somewhere else in the command chain, would do just that. Of course that scenario is very unlikely, but just how unlikely? One chance in a hundred would be terrifyingly high. One chance in a thousand would still be very scary. None of this says that anything should be done – only that it’s reasonable for Israel at least to be very worried about a nuclear Iran. And like it or not, a nuclear attack on Israel would have bad consequences for the US as well.

The other fear is of an escalation like the Cuban missile crisis. One of the US officials involved in it, I forgot his name, estimated later that there’d been about a five percent chance of that crisis escalating into nuclear war. That’s terrifying!

Finally, Klein’s suggestion that a nuclear-armed Iran wouldn’t have to worry about an Israeli or American attack was very cute, and of course it’s true, but it was too clever. Neither Israel nor the US has any interest or even ideological reason to attack Iran. The only ideological motivation is on Iran’s side: they’re the ones calling for the annihilation of the Zionist entity. But neither side would likely just wake up some morning and attack the other. The only way that Israel would conceivably attack Iran would be if Iran’s clients, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other militias, were inflicting heavy, sustained damage on Israel’s population. But Israel didn’t even attack Syria in response to its client Hezbollah’s attacks, and Syria has no atomic bomb. So it would take a very serious war for Israel to attack Iran, even a non-nuclear Iran. The most likely result of a nuclear Iran would be a serious push for Iranian hegemony in the gulf, and of course the gulf states understand that quite well.

This public statement by Klein is most welcome, just as his criticism of the Jewish neoconservatives — he really wrote “Jewish neoconservatives” — in Time a few years back was also welcome. We need more figures willing to say these things, left, right, and center.

Let me state the obvious, for the record: Klein can get away with saying this stuff because he is Jewish.

Hey, Ed, thanks for, uh, explaining my little joke. As long as you’re explaining jokes, you could have put in that it was also an allusion to that Seinfeld joke about the Three Tenors.

To the other “Ed,” Mr. Bierhanzel: I wasn’t clear about your point 2. I meant there’s no reason to attack Iran, other than to keep Iran from getting nuclear capability. So Iran’s getting a bomb would be a solution to a problem caused by their getting a bomb in the first place.

Re point 3, I’m not talking (only) about the “map of time” quote. Iran has stated many times that the Zionist entity, the State of Israel, must be destroyed. (That’s the state, not the Jewish population of the state.) There’s nothing remarkable about this position; it’s the position of all Muslim countries that have not recognized the State of Israel.

Mr. W. Burns comment suggests that Iranian people are neither sophisticated or educated. Joe Klein has travelled to Iran several times. Have you ever travelled to Iran or your comment is merely based on what you see on TV?